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CALGARY — City hall is proposing to alleviate Crowchild Trail of traffic lights and backups with several new interchanges, gargantuan ramps and not one but two extra bridges over the Bow River.

The ambition and scope of the multi-decade plan, to be released this week, comes with an even more ambitious price tag: $750 million to $1 billion, in today’s dollars.

That’s enough to redo the Glenmore-Elbow interchange, the $110-million road megaproject of last decade, several times over.

The concept to overhaul Crowchild between 17th Avenue S.W. to 24th Avenue N.W. has another hard-to-swallow cost: scores of homes and other properties that would have to be cleared out, particularly in West Hillhurst.

Janice Paskey worries such an expansion would bring the long-term “industrialization” of a community already unhappy with heavy cut-through traffic.

“We looked at it and said, ‘OK, we’ll all have time to get out of here,’ ” said Paskey, chairwoman of the West Hillhurst Community Association’s traffic committee.

Ald. Druh Farrell hopes transportation planners can minimize the disruption that such massive change would bring, with much consultation ahead before council approves a corridor plan next spring.

“We don’t bulldoze neighbourhoods like we did in the 1970s,” she said.

But she knows ending one of Calgary’s worst traffic choke points has huge trade-offs.

There are various alternatives and phases at this stage to ease the community impact but also dampen potential improvements to traffic along the corridor. The less the changes do to the thousands who live along the corridor, the less the changes will do for the 107,000 Calgarians who drive the corridor.

The first phase, which would come within 10 years if money materializes, wouldn’t encroach on West Hillhurst nor take out any of the traffic lights. The first new river crossing would, however, aim to end the weaving motorists taking Bow Trail to Memorial must do on Crowchild, from the left-lane on ramp to the right-side exit.

“They’ve got to change lanes three times, and they’ve only got the length of the bridge to do that,” said Cameron Matwie, the city’s manager of transportation network planning.

To get from downtown to Memorial west of downtown, drivers would have to follow 10th Avenue and use the new bridge, tentatively called the 10th Avenue Bridge. This crossing would take drivers to a set of lights on a realigned Memorial, and also handle motorists exiting Crowchild via a new off-ramp or collector road that starts all the way south of 17th Avenue.

Eventually, a second bridge would be added for northbound thru traffic on Crowchild, leaving the existing crossing to handle southbound traffic.

Future phases would eliminate all remaining traffic lights on Crowchild, adding new interchanges at Kensington Road, 16th Avenue and 24th Avenue N.W. The 5th Avenue N.W. intersection would become a flyover or two dead ends, and 23rd Avenue N.W. and McMahon Stadium would likely be accessed by service roads.

The changes would create three lanes of free-flow traffic in each direction, all the way along Crowchild. With all the current left-side merges and exits, there’s only one continuous northbound lane on Crowchild, Matwie said.

The first open house for the project is on Tuesday at the Red and White Club.

Crowchild was envisioned as a freeway back in the 1970s, not long after the artery’s opening a decade earlier. Since then, improvements at either end have eliminated traffic lights south of the river and along Crowchild’s diagonal crawl toward the northwest corner of Calgary.

With the city so far from a final concept plan, the transportation department hasn’t yet calculated how many properties would have to be expropriated. But it’s far more than the city secured under past Crowchild expansion plans. The concept maps show on-ramps overtop existing homes in Briar Hill, Scarboro and especially West Hillhurst, as well as much of the football stadium parking lot and the colourful gymnasium of Sunalta School.

The ultimate solution — which Matwie referred to as the “worst” — would add 10 new ramps or realigned Crowchild overpasses, and take out a swath of residences reaching as far east as 23rd Street N.W.

It’s just a possible solution, he repeatedly stressed in the interview.

“Would we ever build this? I’m not sure,” Matwie said.

A friend of Paskey’s just bought a $1.4-million house in the path of one ramp.

“These are not teardowns,” she said.

The expansion proposals would compete with neighbourhood preservation, but something else as well: scarce infrastructure dollars when the city has billions worth of LRT lines it wants to build as well.

“We’ll likely be putting our priority toward transit,” Farrell said.

But in nods to the alternatives to driving the city strives to promote, the freeway project would also feature sidewalks and bikeways on the first new bridge, as well as a bus and carpool lane.

The majority of Crowchild motorists use it to get to or from downtown or another inner-city exit, but 40 per cent drive straight through its inner-city stretch, often toward the universities or hospitals at either end.

Tracy Stewart, who lives in Bridgeland and works at the Olympic Oval, knows well the epic waits for pedestrians at the 24th Avenue N.W. intersection, and the sudden weaving left and right.

“There’s people flying at you from both directions,” she said.

But told of the long-term cost, Stewart uttered a word the Herald cannot print. And the thought of knocking out many homes to improve traffic flow “makes me gag,” she said.

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Crowchild streamlining would cost up to $1 billion and swallow up homes

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